Case Study
Delft University of Technology Library
Creating IIIF Manifests to make online exhibitions from existing digital collections.
Digirati's work for Delft University of Technology Library provides ways of reusing digitised collections beyond the presentation of objects in a conventional viewer interface. Using our Manifest Editor, TU Delft Library can remix and build new digital objects from their existing collections, publish the objects using the same open standards (IIIF), and then run them through a custom static site generator process to build a digital exhibition.
TU Delft Library uses a simple modular system for physical exhibitions:
Delft Modular Exhibits: Courtesy Delft University of Technology Library
We built a static site generator that builds a digital version of this exhibit, from the Manifest Editor's output. The editorial task is to assemble a Manifest, from existing resources and new content, for feeding the static site generator. Content is selected by browsing IIIF collections, or by adding new source images and text directly. In TU Delft Library mode, the editor has a plugin for our IIIF Cloud hosting platform, so you can create new IIIF Image API resources by dragging in images from the desktop.
Building an exhibit in the Manifest Editor
The resulting static site has multiple pages, embedded deep zoom viewers with the ability to mix images on the same deep zoom surface, galleries and text descriptions. All generated from standard IIIF representations, with a few extra hints to direct what the static site generator makes of it.
A page of the TU Delft Library static site
For more information about this initial project and the principles behind the first version of the Manifest Editor see this blog post Reaching into collections to tell stories. As a key stakeholder, Delft have recently contributed additional input and funding towards a new version of the Manifest Editor building on what we have learnt from the original implementation, and in terms of Delft's use cases in particular, decoupling the actual viewing experience to allow for different pluggable options that produce IIIF Manifests with particular structures and custom behavior properties, to drive custom user experiences such as slideshows, guided viewing and the complex digital exhibition layouts that they will require in the future.
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